Bull Moose Strikes Back

As I wrote here I think that Rachel Corrie’s parents suing Caterpillar is at once both naive and arrogant beyond comprehension. German civilians that lived in the 40’s might as well start suing Boeing for manufacturing the B-17.

So imagine how thrilled I was to find that Ronald Slye, an Associate Professor from Seattle University Law School, which I will be attending starting in June, is involved in bringing the suit.

His rationale for the suit against Caterpillar is the principle that “if I lend you my car, knowing that you plan to use it to hit someone against whom you have a dispute, I can be held liable for the harm you created.”

Sure. But to make it more applicable to the Corrie situation, the example would read more like this: “If I lend you my car in order to stop someone from killing your child, and you run over an accomplice – even a naive, idealistic accomplice – in the conspiracy to kill your child who has purposely put herself in your way to try to stop you from preventing the murder of your child, well, that accomplice should have used her feet and gotten the hell out of the way. Too damn bad.”

When I was an undergrad, most of my classes were in science and math. Those Profs generally steered clear of politics. And when I did have to take a history or poli sci class, I generally let the left-wing talk slide because, frankly, I had harder classes to worry about rather than getting in a pissing match with my professor.

I wonder now, though, how I will keep my temper. I’m older, wiser, have a decade of real world experience beneath my belt – which will be a few years more than some of the law Profs will have.
Hopefully they can keep their politics out of class, and I can worry about homework, my job, and family on my time, they can assist the parents of terrorist collaborators with ridiculous lawsuits on theirs.

Somehow, I doubt it’s always going to work out that way, though.

UPDATE:
Response to the comments section:
Yeah, you’re right, Palestinian homicide bombers don’t target busses, discos, and shopping malls.

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I have to do an awful lot (for me) of commercial flying in the next four months. I just did the first of five trips over the extended weekend – from Seattle to Minneapolis and back – and I’ve about had it. Driving through Montana five times is looking better and better.

No, I’m not afraid of flying, I’m afraid of airports and the inside of airplanes.

Do you ever wish something you wanted or had to do was a little more expensive so that less people would do it, it was a little improved or both?

In the Minneapolis airport yesterday I got through security quickly and decided to play some pinball. Unfortunately some family had set up camp in the arcade area. One of the kids interfered with my game and when I asked him to step back his mom gave me a dirty look. Then she went back to screaming at the skill crane for “screwing her.”

OK, over to the waiting area. Yes, old lady in the waiting area near me, there are a lot of people waiting here. They are waiting to get into the two big jets leaving in 15 minutes from these two gates. It does not warrant a 10-minute conversation. Neither does the fact that people have cell phones now days. No amount of complaining is going to stop that. And what the hell? You dug out your cell phone and turned it off when you got on the plane. It’s OK for you but no one else should own one?

And yes, young business man, just because I support your right to have a cell phone and a wireless headset does not mean I want to hear you loudly discuss where you were going to “do Thai” all the way from the plane to baggage claim. Maybe if yahoos like you would turn down the volume on your idiotic yammering I’d have to hear less people bitch about people owning cell phones.

And Sun Country Airlines – you are aware that there are many people taller than 6′ 3″ right? I won’t complain about how narrow the seats were, because circumference around my thighs is something I can control somewhat, but my height was kind of out of my control. I literally had to fold myself in. If I was 1/4″ taller there’s no way I could have. I was lucky enough to get an exit row on the way home, but my knees still hurt from Thursday. If you are going to squeeze in three extra rows, you should warn people when they buy tickets. I’d say you’re trying to sell first class seats, but there isn’t even a first class on your planes.
And by the way, try using this thing called “reality” when making your schedule. Admit you can’t get the plane landed, taxied, parked at the gate unloaded, refueled, checked out, catered, and re-loaded, taxied and to the runway in 30 minutes. Just admit that it takes an hour minimum and people will be happier than waiting at the gate for an extra hour.

As for the hippies sitting next to me on the way back to Seattle, it’s common courtesy to bathe when you are going to share an enclosed space for almost 4 hours with humans. And dude across the aisle from me, I’m less interested in the Book of Mormon than I am with the conversation ahead of me between the Cabala lady and a potential convert ahead of me. Is this a plane or a third string religion conversion clearinghouse?

Only four more trips before July 15…

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I have the distinction of running the last blog in America to chime in on the Terri Schiavo’s situation. It’s just such an emotional mess of an issue and I can’t get behind either side 100% so I haven’t felt compelled to sit down and bang something out. I was a little annoyed to hear Congress was getting involved with the case, but they tailored the bill so tightly it will turn out not to matter. And the fact of the matter is that if a Federal Court has jurisdiction over the case, Congress by way of Section 5 of the 14th Amendment has an obligation to be sure the laws are appropriately enforced.

Here’s one thing I feel I can say for certain: Michael Schiavo is a scuzz ball. I don’t think it’s out of the realm of likelihood that he put her in this condition by strangling her in the first place as her parents seem to believe.
It seems he got pretty interested in carrying out Terri’s “wish” to die after she was awarded a million bucks for her care. RNs caring for Terri have quoted him as saying “When is that bitch gonna die?” I kind of thought he would accept an offer of $1 million to transfer custody to her parents but he has probably convinced himself that he’s not a low life sleaze in it for the money.
Since he’s living with another woman and siring her children, I hardly see how he can be thinking as Terri’s husband anymore.
The fact of the matter is, he’s not. If my wife were in that state, and even if she didn’t want to continue like that, I’d have her fully examined with the latest technology by the best experts I could find before I removed the tube. Terri has not been examined in ten years. No PET Scan has ever been done. Where’s the harm in being sure she’s not minimally conscious?

Of course, there’s the other side. I wouldn’t want to live in a persistent vegetative state, if that’s what she truly is in. I’ve made that clear to my parents, my wife, my co-workers, people walking down the street, whoever. But I can see a situation where someone might be afraid to tell his or her very religious parents that. If nothing else comes from this case, I hope living wills are the big windfall for lawyers in 2005.
Are her parents just clinging on to false hope? Who knows? They seem like the real deal to me, and since there is no documentation of her choice and based on the way her husband has been acting, I tend to think they should be the ones making the decision. Since the ship has sailed on any dying with dignity this lady ever had a shot at, it’s kind of a no lose situation. If she really is in a PVS she’s not suffering anyway. If she’s really minimally conscious, she stays alive and not dehydrated to death.

There’s another thing I’m pretty sure of: I doubt Terri Schaivo wanted her death to become the political and media circus it has become.

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Many of you might have noticed that when lefties get to calling Bush Hitler and anyone who voted for him Nazi collaborators – yes even Republican WWII veterans who fought actual Nazis – that one of the numbers they love to cite to back up this claim is that 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the US invasion. Someone somewhere in the comments section here has made that claim.

Now, I’ve always thought that this number must be way off. Anyone who had a vague idea of how this war was fought, with something like 80% of all munitions of the precision guided type, must have known that the 100,000 number was probably more statistical trickery and wishful thinking – sick, but what else do you call it?- on the part of the study’s authors.

Well, turns out statistical trickery is exactly what went on. I’m sure that you’re as shocked as I that investigators at a world-renowned university like John Hopkins would participate in intellectual dishonesty for political reasons.

8000 sounds like a reasonable number – maybe a little low. 16,000 – very possible (this is about the range that left wing Iraq Body Count giddily estimantes). 24,000 is getting high but I’d believe it with enough evidence, and that’d only be 0.1% of the civilian population, a number I’m sure the people of Dresden and Tokyo would’ve begged for in 1945.

UPDATE:
I was just perusing Iraq Body Count and noticed that they seem to be adding Iraqi civilians killed by anti-democratic terrorists to their count. That’s all well and good, they pay for the server space, but if they are going to add in deaths that the coalition military isn’t directly involved in, maybe they should normalize that number by subtracting out the average 24,000 Iraqi civilians executed by Saddam a year while he was in power (and that’s probably a conservative estimate.)

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Even I overestimated the number of idiots willing to put their support for their dead idealism on display. I said 1500-2000 below, and it looks like there were about 1000 that showed up.

I can already hear their litany of excuses, even after they inflate the numbers a few hunderd: It was drizzling, Washington and Gonzaga were playing in the tourney, there’s a shortage of kind bud around. Bah.

I wish I could be surprised there are 1000 people still willing to pretend what happened in Iraq isn’t one of the greatest things to happen to that country since the Garden of Eden.

UPDATE:
The Seattle Times parroted the organizer’s estimate of 5000 smelly, no good hippies at the rally. They did not report the always much lower police estimate.
Meanwhile, The Kitsap Sun ran a 600 word article about a gathering of 20(!) anti-war protestors on the good side of the moat.
I was at a Halo 2 LAN party on Saturday with about 12 guys not far from where that protest was. I’d bet at least 10 of them were for the war to some extent or another. Where’s our 300 word article?

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The family of terrorist supporting, lefty folk hero and pancake impersonator Rachel Corrie has filed suit against the Caterpillar corporation.

To borrow from Dennis Miller, aren’t balls that big usually found rolling in a cavern behind Indiana Jones?

The Rachel Corrie saga has always stuck in my craw because she went to Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, an institution of “higher learning” that is funded with my tax dollars to indoctrinate lefty students even more so than a regular college. Evergreen is famous for it’s “group hug” style of academics and was recently named the best college by High Times Magazine.
I blame the Evergreen State mentality for her death as much as I hold her responsible herself. I’m sure the last thing Corrie had running through her head was stunned indignation that the power of her self righteousness wasn’t stopping the bulldozer.

“The brutal death of my daughter should never have happened,” Corrie’s mother, Cindy Corrie, said in a statement.
It certainly didn’t. And it wouldn’t have been if she was in class like a normal college student instead of out trying to block Isreali soldiers from protecting their bus riding children by collapsing a weapons smuggling tunnel. (There is a reason I put an Aljazeera link up – there is a great picture of terrorist mastermind Yassar Arafat meeting with Corrie’s parents.)

It’s fine that Corrie decided that her Jew hating was worth dying over. People die for stupid reasons all the time. I just ask that they take my tax dollars out of that decision.

Which brings me to her lefty parents suing Caterpillar. So much for your daughter’s sacrifice to your cause (it’s clear the parents indoctrinated her with their lefty ideas early, they’ve been on TV spouting off ever since the day she died).
She made a concious decision to go to a war zone, then to a place in that war zone that was restricted, then to stand in between a Caterpillar and what she probably knew was a facility for terrorist activities.
No offense, but fuck her. It’s her fault her little orange vest didn’t stop her death, not Caterpillars for manufacturing a bulldozer that has many, many purposes besides terrorist hideout crunching.

If there is any justice this grandstanding suit will be kicked out of court like a hippy at a gun club.

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How sad it must be for local hippies that their next temper tantrum will be thrown on a Saturday. It’ll be much harder to screw up rush hour traffic with no rush hour.

You know, this is all Paul Wolfowitz’s fault. If he would’ve ordered Cheney to start the war on a Monday they could’ve had four straight years to interfere with the daily business of useful people.

They can take solace in the fact that I’m sure they’ll scare the living hell out of some kids with unwitting parents that are trying to bring them to the Pacific Science Center with their inevitable freak show.

Check out the sponsors of this rally. It’s a who’s who of anti-American groups claiming de facto solidarity with the terrorists in Iraq: International Socialist [communist] Organization, Seattle Gay News (which sets back gay rights every time a straight person reads it), Washington State Jobs with Justice – another commie organization, and on and on.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the South Park that ran this week was about how silly hippies are thinking they are accomplishing anything with their gatherings.
Again, I have to question what these little fits have ever accomplished:

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Wow. Life imitates cheesy TV movie.

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day to everyone with the blood of a boiled-potato-smellin’, whiskey drinkin’, filthy Irsishman pumping through their veins. I have a little myself.

March Madness Starts and St. Paddy’s Day? Time to start drinking! But throw your car keys in the bog if you can’t stop yourself from driving drunk.

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It was one of those days today, where since I got on the bus in the morning, I was ready to snap at the first person who said or did anything stupid within earshot. I was irritated all day and I’m not sure why (a trip to Best Buy after work took the edge off.)

I, therefore, was fantastically impressed with myself when with about 30 minutes left in the work day, a functionally retarded co-worker – he looks like a skinny Frankenstein’s Monster – flashed a shit eating grin to an aging hippie co-worker and said, “How’s that coalition of the willing looking now?”

He was referring of course to Italy’s impending withdrawl from Iraq. Well Frankenstein and Hippie lady had a good chuckle until they saw me standing down the hall trying my hardest not to go break a chair over their heads, at which point they took it into a different room.

I have a couple thoughts on Italy’s withdrawl. First, I’m not sure how long I expected the Italians to keep their troops there anyway. Silvio Berlusconi was one of our staunchest allies, but he paid a heck of a price politically. At this point, after combat operations are over and with a democratically elected government he’s well into diminishing returns.

Also, it’s pretty clear that self proclaimed anti-American commie journalist and liar Giuliana Sgrena helped matters along.
I sure am glad that the Italians paid terrorists a big money ransom for a waste of oxygen like her. Money that as we speak is being used to fund operations for anti-democratic forces. In some ways it might be better not to have the Italians around anyway.

Which brings me back to my lefty co-workers, people who are all too representitive of Seattlites in general. What the hell were they so happy about? Despite what I said, no matter how you slice it, losing a coalition member weakens the coalition, at least a little bit. Is that not a victory, if even just a moral victory, for the anti-democratic terrorists?
These idiots are sharing a victory with terrorists.

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the old saying goes. In March 2005, with Saddam gone, a democratic Iraqi government installed, and the winds of freedom blowing across the middle east, maybe these gotards, along with all the fools set to march on Saturday across the country, should reexamine what side they want to be on.

Iraq is never going to be uninvaded. We’re not going to put Saddam back in charge and get a refund for the war. Much like the end of the cold war, we have a large group of useful idiots living about three years in the past. Come back to the present or get the hell out of the way.

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It’s a fifty-fifty day for justice today.
On one hand, Robert Blake was acquitted,but on the other hand Scott Peterson was denied a new trial sentenced to die.
Of course sentenced to die means sentenced to grow old in prison. On paper it looks good, though.

All said and done, I’d rather have Blake get away with it than Peterson. At least Blake murdered a gold digging slimeball rather than a woman who wanted to have his baby for non-blackmail purposes.

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Tonight’s South Park is entitled “Die Hippie, Die.”
That should say enough, but the episode description reads “Cartman seeks to rid the world of hippies once and for all.”

Fantastic.

UPDATE:
Just watched the episode. Matt and Trey took a page out of thier “Team America” and lampooned hippies within the context of lampooning a Jerry Bruckheimer subgenre – the one man saves the Earth from disaster subgenre in this case.
Fantastically hilarious, in any case.

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Three geniuses at the table next to me on the ferry were doing a crossword puzzle. The clue was “Red Planet” and they had “s” as the last letter and it was four letters.

Well, they decided the sun must be the Red Planet, despite the sun not being a planet or red. The problem, of course, is that “sun” is only three letters and the s is at the start.

They then started debating whether the sun was actually “the sun” or if it had some special name, I guess they meant Sol, “like how the Earth really is called something different than ‘Earth’.”
I was processing the news that all this time I was living someplace other than “Earth,” so I never did hear what conclusion they came to, but in any case they moved on after a “Yeah, that’s it.”

I kind of wanted to trade them the answer, Mars, for a peak at what they had written. But I figured it wasn’t worth the risk that if I laughed at them they wouldn’t sit near me anymore. Then I’d miss important news like I’m not living on Earth.

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Here is an interesting report filed in American Journal of the Blatantly Obvious.

Investor’s Daily had a good analysis of this story from which I quote:

Anyone following the media last year knows this is true — despite media bigwigs’ denials and liberals’ claims of conservative bias. Look no further than coverage of two big stories.

It was treated as a major story, first by CBS, which got the “scoop,” then by other news outlets that piled on. Unfortunately, Burkett’s story fell apart under the relentless scrutiny of Internet bloggers. It cost CBS anchor Dan Rather his job.”

That report didn’t dissipate my constant confusion on the assaults on Fox News. Such assaults never really seem to mesh with reality for me. O’Reilly and Hannity aside – they are both openly OPINION programs and Hannity even has Colmes for the lefty perspective, you know, kind of like “Crossfire” – they report pretty much the same stories as CNN or MSNBC, just with some of the lefty spin taken off. I have been just as frustrated with them at times as I have been with CNN or MSNBC or the big three at times. For instance when the shells found with sarin were found in a roadside bomb, Fox News dismissed them as quickly as the others for being “reminants of an old arsenal,” something General Tommy Franks didn’t think was the case. But what the hell would he know, I guess.

So either these people have never watched Fox News and just drink the Kool Aid, or they have watched it and are just incensed that they don’t work in a lefty spin in every damn story…

UPDATE:
Funny, but RWN posted a piece about this report and Fox.
See, I guess I don’t think that reporting the terrorists and other enemies of our country shooting at our soldiers as “the bad guys” as bias, but I suppose it is. To me it just seems like they are coming from a sane American view that is kind of the low water mark of bias.

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They’ll see your 500,000, syria, and raise you another 300,000…

Incidentally, I’m sure there is a babe in that shot, somewhere.

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Take a few seconds today to remember the Spanish victims of Al Qaeda that died a year ago today.

Try not to think too much about how their fellow Spaniards dishonored their deaths by folding like a cheap suit and running away like a bunch of pussies.

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TiVo is worth it’s weight in gold. It saved me from being having to sit through the entire episode of The OC in order to watch the sweet new Star Wars: Episode III trailer.

What a fantastic trailer. I almost hesitate to say it, but it gives me hopes of an Empire Strikes Back caliber Star Wars movie.
It’s all here: Darth Vader, Chewbacca, lots of light sabers, downer ending. OK, no Han Solo, but there promises to be a good Sam Jackson death scene (he’s not going to go out like a punk).

Fan-freakin’-tastic. I’m going to watch it again. Thank God Al Gore invented TiVo.

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No surprises here:

Visit the Star Wars shop to get your own, or it can be seen on my living room wall from the end of March until my wife has had enough.

Only two months to go until the last Star Wars! It is fitting that the movie series that had such a huge impact on my childhood will conclude shortly after I have had my own child.

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Hillary’s long march to the center is well under way.
Even Bubba is helping out.

Will she make it by 11-08? And will any red states fall for it?

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This gives me an idea.
I think it would be awfully fun to put pro-Bush stickers back on my car and just drive slowly around Seattle to see who I could lure into a large enough rage they’d take the first swing.

Of course, the problem with that is that since they don’t want their ass beat they’d probably haul ass the second they got a look at me.
Maybe I’d have my wife drive and I can hide under some blankets in the back. Yeah….

Disclaimer: bullmoosestrikesback.com only advocates the use of force in self defense (including preemptive action).

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